Being a techie dad has great perks. You can impress your kids by setting a website for their hockey team. Or at least, you impress the other parents on the team, since your kids know that it didn’t take you that long to create the WordPress site.

Which is why I chose to work with WordPress in the first place: easy to install, lots of themes (free and paid) available, and lots of extensions that are useful for a Hockey team. Plus, it’s available in lots of languages, and is easy to manage after it’s all set up. But it’s ubiquitous. Millions of people, companies, non-profits use it — even CakeMail uses it for the blog.

The website I created for the hockey team is used to share important information with other parents. But updates get missed. Information doesn’t go through. The easiest way to get in touch with all the parents was to send emails.

It could’ve been done with Gmail – the list is fairly small. But where’s the fun in that? Plus, as a techie dad, I do have a reputation to uphold. Most importantly, however, I wanted to make sure that my wife, the Team’s Manager, would have an easy time tracking who read the emails.

The obvious solution was to set up a CakeMail account for the team.

This meant that she could use the banner from the website and have it appear neatly in the emails she sent. It meant that that the emails would be professional. Overall, it helps with extending the feeling that the team is in the Big Leagues, not a Bantam.

But it also meant that I needed proof that the other parents wanted to receive the emails – a double opt in confirmation, set up using a signup form.

If you have a WordPress website, or created one for a customer, you know it’s easiest to manage it if you have plugins for all the different actions you want on the website. So I worked on a plugin that would allow parents to sign up from the website. But I didn’t want my wife to go through five different steps just to have a form that would kind-of, sort-of look like the rest of the website.

The plugin that we created at CakeMail pulls the information from the website you set up. You just install the plug in, log in to your CakeMail account and the form will seamlessly integrate to your website. No code. No guesswork. Bonus: it takes no time to set up.